In the past, pre-screening candidates for example, for high-volume, non-exempt hiring was handled by telephone, and in an early attempt at automation, candidates were asked to call a voice response unit (VRU) number. After pre-screening by telephone, the candidates are scheduled manually, and manually pre-screening and scheduling candidates is likewise a very expensive and time consuming process. Also, manually testing, tracking, and staffing, for example, for high-volume, non-exempt hiring is a vast administrative process, which is very expensive and time consuming. When done manually, as was the practice in the past, the process is very inefficient, and the results are haphazard at best. In the manual process, candidates are typically hired on a first-come, first-to-pass-a-test basis, without the benefit of seeing a pool of passing candidates and being able to select the top candidates from the pool. Further, manually scheduling candidates into training sessions also presents major problems in coordinating, for example, with training personnel to determine when training classes are available. There is currently a need for automated methods and systems for employment candidate recruitment, pre-screening, scheduling, testing, tracking, and staffing, with targeted functionality in recruiting for and filling high volume non-exempt positions.
Commercially available applicant tracking systems bring in applicants' resumes, for example, by email, by fax, via the web, or in paper format. In such systems, most resumes are received by the applicant tracking system in electronic form, and when a resume is received in fax or paper format, it is converted to an electronic text file by the tracking system using optical character recognition (OCR). A potential problem arises, for example, when an applicant submits his/her resume more than once, and as a result, the particular applicant has duplicate resumes in the applicant tracking system. Currently, commercially available applicant tracking systems are not effective in handling such duplicate resumes. For example, currently available applicant tracking systems can typically deal with duplicate fax or paper format resumes when such duplicates are first received. However, if there are already duplicate resumes in the tracking system, or if resumes are automatically input into a tracking system database directly from a network, such as the Internet, as is typically the case, there is a great potential for problems with duplicate resumes with which currently available applicant tracking systems cannot cope. Assume, for example, that an applicant submits his/her resume for ten different positions. In that case, there are potentially ten different versions of the applicant's resume in a currently available applicant tracking system. Thus, there is a current need for a method and system of applicant resume data management that identifies and merges duplicate resume information in a resume tracking system to create a single unique resume in the tracking system that combines all of the relevant applicant information from the different versions of the applicant's resume.